Chopping up your Chanel handbag to spite your face
A pertinent question considering the world we’re living in
Isee a lot of Russian oligarch-adjacent influencers, models and other beneficiaries of Russian state capture have started a new internet trend. It’s a little more pricey than that time people were pouring cold buckets of ice water over themselves, or planking, or suddenly dropping, or busting a move. But it’s in the same vein. What you do is take your Chanel handbag and cut it up while spewing Russian invective. Preferably in a very Instagram-friendly location like the balcony of your presidential suite at the Ritz. I admit this trend is not for everyone.
It’s not an entirely unprecedented act to chop up your accessories on a social media platform as a very public demonstration of your rattled feelings about the manufacturer of said accessories. A few years ago I watched a lot of Chinese celebrities flush their Dolce & Gabbana goodies down the literal toilet when they felt that the brand had shamed their nation.
To be fair, poop emojis (as sent by Stefano Gabbana to fashion writer Michaela Phuong on Instagram) are very disheartening to a fragile national ego when paired with choice words about the national persona on leaked DMs. And so, obviously, the Chinese firmament went into overdrive against the perpetrator of the poop emojis and trashed their D&G products as a show of national pride. I think they are over it now and they might be back on the Dolce & Gabbana bandwagon.
But what do we make of the Russian socialites who are boldly giving their Chanel bags the chop? This is not a case of late-night emojis. Chanel have pulled out of Russia in solidarity with Ukraine. But they have gone a step further and said that their Russian clientele are barred from shopping in any of their other boutiques, making hopping onto a private plane to Paris, London, New York or any other world capital where Chanel boutiques abound a dead end for the hitherto pampered princesses of the Russian regime. I don’t need to tell you how bad this turn of events is for your content feed. So I can totally understand the sour-grapes impulse to chop up your bag if you can’t have it.
Chanel wants to be on the right side of the war this time round. The last time the world was dealing with this sort of thing, by which I mean an unprovoked, full-scale war (no, not Iraq — the other one before that — the one driven by a brutal authoritarian bent on demonstrating his power and securing his lebensraum and empire by crushing Ukraine and its piffling neighbours), Coco was in a bit of a compromised position. She was shacked up at the Paris Ritz with an aristocratic diplomatic representative of the Nazi regime.
She had started dating him long before the war when he was still just a German count and Hitler was just a blip on the horizon in a brown shirt with a bad moustache. But as you can imagine, the postwar reckoning with their realpolitik was not very good for business and it took many long years to rub out that stain of association. I think mademoiselle actually shut up shop for a bit and moved to Switzerland. So there can be no repeats.
This time, Chanel is making sure that if some addled Russian influenza (what we like to call Instagram influencers) is compelled to do a little shopping to dull the noise of the bombs, the rattle of the tanks and the low hum of studied ignorance, they can do it online. Under an assumed identity. One that’s registered in the Cayman Islands. If, that is, they can get their credit cards to work. Maybe they’ll be chopping those up next.